Summary: NO (Incase you don’t want to read further)
I set out to build myself a new desktop recently and one of the decisions I had to make was “Do I go with DDR3, or stick with DDR2?”, then of course if you stick with DDR2, do you go with oldie 800 ram or shoot for the 1066 or higher but pay the premium? I wasn’t sure at the time, so I set out to some do some research, and here is what I found…
First off, DDR3 has been on the market for a while now, but you never hear about it for 2 reasons:
- It’s expensive as hell, usually about 2x the price of DDR2 ram or more.
- There is no noticeable performance improvement using it.
The reason for #2 is the same reason DDR2 wasn’t awesome right away when it first came out: the latencies are much higher and even though the bandwidth ceiling is much higher, we aren’t even maxing out what we have already… so it’s a moot point.
I was originally looking at building a machine using the Intel QX9650 and figured a quad-core beast with a 1333mhz FSB would definately need either DDR3 ram or the highest end DDR2 (1600?) RAM I could scrounge up.
Once I went looking and prices and realized that in some cases the price of 1GB of expensive DDR3 ram was the same price was 4GBs of DDR2-800 ram, I decided to look up some benchmarks to see if this mess was even worth it.
NOTE: For the folks that didn’t do a lot of computing in the 90s and building their own machines, finding “good” ram with awesome “timings” like 1 and 2 CAS latencies used to make a big difference, especially in gaming. But as computers have gotten faster and faster the difference good memory allows is completely negligible now except for overall stability… that is still important when buying good ram.
As I trapes’ed my way around online I ran across a great benchmark from Digit-Life comparing DDR2-800 to DDR3-1333… memory that couldn’t be farther apart on the performance scale; and exactly what I wanted. If there was a benefit to DDR3 this benchmark was going to make it clear.
The other great thing about this benchmark is that it used both the new, unreleased QX9770 and the QX9650 to saturate the memory with the fastest quad-core CPUs available today (and likely for the next 6 months). The results were surprising to say the least.
I immediately scrolled down to the most CPU-intensive task I could find, Video Encoding:
notice that there is absolutely no difference between the DDR2-800 and DDR3-1333 setups during this task?
Then I scrolled down to a normalized gaming score between the two and again, found almost absolutely no difference:
I figured with the added bandwidth provided by DDR3 that games atleast would be running faster with so much texture work to push, but apparently we aren’t even making full use of that is provided by DDR2-800 at this point… meaning something else in the PC is the bottleneck.
This is equatable to how SATA-2 connections allow for a 3GB/sec bandwidth right now, but a typical SATA hard drive will burst around 110MB/sec and sustain around 50-70MB/sec… no where near the 3GB/sec cap on the bus (unless you had some insane RAID setup).
So the good news from all of this is that you can safely buy DDR2-800 ram for $40/GB instead of the fucking crazy DDR3 ram for the forseeable future.
And don’t even bother with DDR2-1066 or higher DDR2 ram… I found benchmarks on those as well comparing to DDR2-800 that again showed almost no difference in performance.
SteelCity1981 is right, he got a great deal on his pc, and like he showed, you couldn’t have built a better pc for that price, not with what it comes with. If you are in the market for a budget pc you are much better off buying a naebrand pc then Building one yourself, because you can save a lot of money over trying to build it. You can buy a brand new budget pc that comes with everything but a monitor for as low as $289. Windows OS alone would cost you 100 dollars if you tried to build a pc yourself. But obv if you are a gamer then building your pc will save you a bundle over buying a namebrand gaming pc. so it all depends upon what you are going to use your pc for.
Truth, what is your problem? All SteelCity1981 said he got a great deal on his computer and you just all of a sudden attacked him for it. So who cares if you don’t have the latest and greatest, you get what you need and not what’s out there. I mean, you want to talk about peoples pc’s being outdated, well guess what so is yours. My Core I7 955 crushes your Phenom II X3 processor, but i’m not going to sit their and act like an ass about it saying how much my processor will mop the floor with yours.
Truth are you that clueless? You sit there and tell people that they shouldn’t wait until USB 3.0 and SATA III to come out and build a new computer around that. What kind of idiotic advise is that? Why on earth would you build a new system right now knowing that the new standards are just around the corner? That’s just horrible advise. What I find funny is that you will sit their and say people that build or buy DDR2 systems right now would be foolish to do so, but yet it’s ok to go ahead and build a new system with old standards that are about to be replaced? That makes no sense what so ever. You should think about changing your name from “Truth” to “clueless”, because givng out bad advise like that is clueless to say the least.
^^^^^ Yeah I know right. Truth was prob one of those brainwashed guys that get sucked into mindless marketing BS. Much like a Microsoft fanboy boy gets sucked into everything Microsoft says.
I guess the truth hurts for truth lol. Word of advise truth, get your head out of you know where and quit being one.
Okay, folks; my Inbox just filled with a whole lot of e-mails advising me of updates to this blog which were really just a bunch of guys arguing. Can we get back to the regularly scheduled program?
~Bryan M.
i was thinking the same thing, this is a ram thread…however, I should be able to defend myself against these vultures…
first off, I don’t think there is a core i7 955.
Second, unless his old machine had a malfunctioning hard drive, he needed a new keyboard, needed a new DVD drive, those are useless extra’s. had he kept his old drive and still useful peripherals, he could have just went for a case/psu/mobo/proc/ram. $100 for proc, $40 for case, $80 for 4gb of DDR2 800 cas 5, and lets say another $35 for psu, and $50 for a mobo. that is roughly $305 brand new. almost a full 25% cheaper, if he had kept his old hard drive, keyboard, and didn’t worry about having 8GB of RAM rather than 4GB. even if he sold 4GB of the ram, it would still bring him almost $40 over my price. replacing something useful you already have doesn’t constitute a ‘deal’.
I was pointing out the irony that he just upgraded to yesteryear tech, but telling everyone else not to upgrade to the new stuff until SATA 3/USB 3 (6 months from now). yet you can have this years tech which is better, faster…for as much as he payed or less. so in essence, he upgraded a little over 6 months before the release of USB 3 AND SATA III (which he wants to get), yet he’s telling everyone else not to. pot calling the kettle. The entire argument can end right there simply because of this fact.
I was also pointing out that the phenom II has serious improvements over the phenom I..not just in design, but in performance. I wasn’t going out of my way to make my x3 720 appear superior to his. I was just showing the fact that the phenom II x3 can beat the phenom I x4, and in some areas beats the phenom II x4.
“What I find funny is that you will sit their and say people that build or buy DDR2 systems right now would be foolish to do so, but yet it’s ok to go ahead and build a new system with old standards that are about to be replaced?”
sata III will double the speeds of sata II, but how many people need that extra speed? i probably shouldn’t be asking that one guy because he’s got at least 4gb of RAM sitting empty 24/7. even the fastest mechanical hard drives of today can’t fully saturate sata I speeds. so obviously, for sata III you’ll need an SSD…and it won’t be cheap either.
The only people that need SATA III are people who need double the transfer rate of SATA II, and need it now for business purposes…or just have money to throw at whatever they want just cause. for a home user to jump on the bandwagon right when it comes out, would be pricey. you’d be better off telling them to wait 6 months after the release before buying…which would be a full year from now by your estimates. if someone needs to upgrade now, do you think that PC will do them for another year?
obviously the same will be for usb 3.0, you’ll need a usb 3.0 drive to get your moneys worth out of it. usb 3 would bottleneck the sata III, and would fully saturate the 300mb/s of sata II (so see you CAN have your usb3 and sata II..and eat it too!
.
all this for what? @300mb/s a 4gb file would take approx. 13 seconds to transfer on sata II. so a sata III could possibly transfer that file at around 6.5 seconds. does that 6.5 seconds extra really matter? to transfer ten 4gb files would take you a little over 60 seconds longer on sata II.
even with sata III 2x as fast, that doesn’t automatically mean 2x entire system performance, it will just mean that it loads into RAM 2x faster…ram is where the workload is manipulated, transferring at several GB/s or more. say you’re opening a 300mb program on a sata II ssd, wow…it took you a whole 1 second to transfer that data to ram…now open that same file on a sata III, and wow it took you a whole unnoticeable .5 seconds less time. again, unless you’re needing to transfer 100’s of GB’s of data daily on a time schedule or to increase productivity out of need, these things aren’t economical nor especially significant. and unless you’re buying something larger than 16 or 32 GB, you’re not going to be transferring too many large files to and from the drive. max a 16GB might hold is an OS, some programs, and a newer game with a bit to spare.
not all SSD’s are the same either, many SATA II ssd’s can’t even fully saturate the sata II bandwidth….even the very pricey high end ones. you’d be better off getting a sata II ssd than a sata III ssd, because the sata II ssd’s would have dropped down in price because of the new sata III. so if you bought now, you’re still covered for sata II ssd’s. anything sata III and capable of coming close to saturating it will come at a hefty price. many sata III’s ssd’s will still have maximum peak performance that could only saturate a sata II, so you’ll have to run 2 raid ssd’s to get the full performance of sata III. quite a pricey demand.
your entire argument rests on the assumption that most people WILL be moving to SSD in 6 months from now (because there is no other reason to want sata III) and will want to pay the premium for an SSD sata3…I don’t see this happening.
future proofing is all fine and good, but if they’re gonna future proof they might as well wait until something has been released for a while for prices to drop. which is why sata II ssd will be much more attractively priced.
so sata III, not so much of a selling point when you really delve into it, usb 3.0 = the same.
Oh i’m sorry you call us vultures but yet you act like a complete ass in your comments.
Yes and little did you fail to understand that I said people waiting for those standards should wait. I think I clearly pointed that out.
Oh I see now it goes from I can build a pc for the same price that’s better, to well if he already had exisiting parts I could. LOL. Well gee so could have I, if I had a vast majority of my parts from another pc transferred over to a new build, but that wasn’t what you were referring to. You simply stated that you could build a better pc for the same price and I clearly showed, that you couldn’t even come near that price building a new pc from the ground up.
It’s called replacing an existing computer that the vast majority of parts wasn’t highly comaptible with the new system I got.
Where did I imply i wanted to get USB 3.0 or SATA III? Nowhere, you’re just making crap up now. If I wanted really needed to get USB 3.0 or SATA III, I would have waited. If I needed to really get DDR3 or a Phenom II X4 for a resonable price, I would have waited. So where are you coming up with this I wanted to get USB 3.0 or SATA III garbage from?
Serious improvments? It still uses the K-10x core logic. Yeah it has a larger cache and faster speeds thanks to the evolution of nm technology, but that’s basicly the bulk of the improvments to it. If you compare clock for clock speeds it only holds about a 10% overall improvment over the olde Phenoms and that’s not me saying this, that’s Xtreme Tech saying that. You sit there acting like the the Phenom II is what the Core 2 Duo logic is to the old Pentuim 4’s core logic.
You are talking about the fastest spindle hard drives, which everyone that stays up with computer tech already knows. We are talking about SSD hard drives and how important SATA III will be for SSD’s in the next couple of years, considering SSD’s have already reached their limits on SATA II standards.
How many people need SATA III? I can think of one category of people that would love to have it right now. Let me see gamers which there are a lot of, that could take advantage of those high rate of speeds especially with major games like Crysis, which seems to be very popular amongest the gaming commuinty.
Of course it does, If you are moving large files the less time the better. An extra 6 seconds starts adding up really fast especially if you run a business where time really plays apart in your production.
Your logic isn’t making much sense so according newer standards aren’t importent, but yet you will praise about DDR3 over DDR2, but yet say certain standards won’t be utlize by the avg consumor. Ok Genuis, how many avg computer users then are going wow I can save an extra 10ns of a few seconds by going from DDR2 to DDR3. I mean seriously, How many avg pc users even know the diff from even going from DDR1 to DDR3 in speed. So you say one thing isn’t important but yet you praise something else and how everyone should go get it now, because that’s where the standards are going, but yet say no one needs the new standards of something else. LOL that’s highly hypocrtical.
Um where did I say that everyone will be moving to SSD’s 6 months from now? Do you just like to make things up? I said within the next couple years people will be moving towards SSD’s.
Nothing is future proof in the world of technolgy.
But the fact still remains that USB 3.0 will be the most popular standard that everyone will be able to take real advantage of. You do releaize a lot of people store a lot of things on many popular exnternal devices from movies to music and USB 3.0 will be greatly needed over USB 2.0 to cut the time in half of trnasfering large files and that, everyone can see.
You talk all of this crap but yet you run a Phenom II X3 and talk about standards? LOL In case you didn’t notice the bulk of new software are quad core enabled not triple core. Someone buy this man a freaking clue of common sense. OBTW my Core 2 Quad Q9550, will eat your Phenom II X3 up for lunch and it runs on DDR2!
Don’t talk down to people as if you know what you are really talking about because you just make stupid contradictions.
Go back to yourself importance world that you live on and leave reality back to people that actually live it That don’t make stupid contradictions.
I meant Core i7 950. Never the less you still don’t have a valid point of any kind to sit there and compare processors, that really had nothing to do with anything about the pc offer he got.
So you just took it upon your own assumption without asking why he bought that pc? You know a lot of people normally keep their pc’s for a long time and by the time they do upgrade their hardware parts on their old system are not comaptbile with the new system they buy. I know this may come to a shock to you but many people don’t build another pc same within the same generation. Go look at the vast majority of consumors they noramlly buy a new pc every 3 to 4 years or longer and by the time they get a new pc many of their old pc parts are deemed not upgradable to put in their new pc, because they are simply too old and not comaptible.
That’s all good and well but you were comparing the smae parts that you could build for either with better technology or the same technology for less and he showed you that you couldn’t. furthermore you forgot about the OS that’s another 100 dollars So that brings your cost to 405 dollars. Lets leave off the extra 4gb of ram he got, and lets add the media card reader the wirless N card that he said that was included, so you are already up to $440 minus the extra 8g of ram add the extra 8gb of ram and that would have came to $560 according to your specs and the aditonal features that you missed or set aside that came with his pc. so even after all that and the left over parts that he had he could transfer over for say like the hard drive. It still would have came to 160 dollars to mathc the same specs that he got for 400 dollars. That not only constitute a ‘deal’ as you would put it but a savings of over 160 dollars. So your logic on that still falls short of the savings he got for his pc and it seems to me that i’m not the only poster that links your logic is a little off base when it comes to what I just mentioned above.
It’s a ram thread and you should be able to protect yourself? You were the one that went off the subject by going after SteelCity’s purchase. So why are you acting like you are the innocent party here????
Is the Asus G71GX-7T029Z laptop at £1450 (rughly $2K) and the belo spec the fastest and cheapest laptop vaialble. I know priced in UK are a lot more than US, but the competng Alienware laptop from Dell is a £1000 more for the similar config…any thoghts
Intel® Quad Core Processor Q9000 (2.00 GHz)
SATA HDD 1TB (500 x 2) ( 5400 RPM)
17″ (WUXGA) Colour Shine ( 1920 x 1200)
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 260M, 1GB dedicated graphics memory,
6104 Mb DDR 800 MHz (2048 x 3)
Blu-Ray Combo
Video Camera built-in (1.3 million pixels)
In-Built Bluetooth
64bit Windows 7 Ultimate
Riyad,
thanks for posting your article, and linking it to proven independent data with modern hardware, tested in a very detailed format. I myself didn’t think the DDR2 vs. DDR3 hype was worth much, nor the difference in timing. (As we find out now, 3-channel DDR3 was hype and Intel’s next round of motherboards for USB3 and SATA6gb support went back to dual channel).
I am all about getting the best bang for the buck. That includes the best performance, per watt used (and heat generated), per dollar. Overclocked or stock.
Intel was recently slammed for cheating on the futuremark tests. they encoded data so the CPUs recognized when performance testing software executables were being launched, and then the CPUs changed the way they operated, to “boost” results that the software interpreted. That sucks because it makes Futuremark tests “unreliable”. google it and you will see articles on the topic.
In conclusion, y’all that were spamming each other took away from the article. there is no best system out there…only the best system for what you need and how much you spent. if you are happy with it, then good. if not, then farm it out to someone and get something else.
Currently, I found a great mix of parts that OC’d to stock AMD 965 numbers on air, for only $270 (as of 12-30-09). They are Asus M3N72-D motherboard. AMD Athlon x4 620 quad-core CPU. Corsair XMS2 Pro 4GB DDR2-800 (tw2×4g6400c5pro). Everything was on sale after Xmas for just under $270…and it is fast. very fast in Windows 7. I’m happy.
Here is another little hit for all people looking for a great deal.
buy a:
AMD Phenom II X2 545 Dual Core Processor.
or
AMD Phenom II X2 550 Dual Core Processor.
A lot of people don’t know this but its actually a Quad core with just 2 cores shut off!
so all you have to do is download “AMD Overdrive” and unlock the other cores!
Look it up on Google. Be sure to do a lot of research be for your take this step. Also make sure your MoBo can support the processor.
HI,
I’m buying a new laptop soon, and i was wondering, what do you think would be a better buy? 6GB of DDR2 or 4GB of DDR3 in a gaming laptop with a dual core processor and a beefy graphics card? I really enjoyed your article.
drummerboy__1, I don’t know how beefy you mean, but if you are talking latest mobile GFX chipset and like $2300 or more for the laptop, the DDR3 is going to serve you better for the gaming *most likely*.
This article is quite old at this point, and the cost of DDR3 dropped quite a bit, then Windows 7 came out, drove the price back up and I’m not sure where it lies now.
Get the 4GB of DDR3 but make sure to get it in a stick configuration that you can add to later, for example, 1 stick of 4GB, so maybe in 6 months you can add another stick to your setup by buying it from newegg.com or something — then you’ll have the best of all worlds.
Happy gaming!
hello dear,
seems u hav done a great research work. i m a novice to this computer line.
i want purchase a new computer having best game compatibility. can u just guide me out with that, it would of great help.
gourab,
I’ll assume you are talking about a desktop computer, in which case the Core i7-920 (newegg link) is still one of the favorites out there for “best bang for the buck” chips — if you want to save a bit more money and not drop that much performance, the Core i5-750 (newegg link) is also an excellent choices.
Those are both going to run on DDR3 platforms, get ATLEAST 4 GB of ram, preferably 6GB even if you are on a budget. If you aren’t on a budget, I am not seeing that big of a performance jump in Windows 7 beyond 8GB, so 6GB is a really solid “best bang for buck” number again.
As for video card, the NVIDIA GTX 285 is still outperforming the newest ATI’s at the highest resolutions (2560+), but the ATI is cheaper and does a hair better on lower res’s, so unless you have a 30″ monitor it’s a pretty fair draw. I tend to prefer NVIDIA — their DX11 part is also going to hit market very soon (this month or next) so you might wait for that to decide if you want to spring for it OR just let it push the price of last-gen stuff down a bit.
Now, all that being said, if you are on a REALLY TIGHT budget, a complete AMD/ATI system can give you some really solid performance for cheap. But you are giving up about 15% performance below comparable Intel chips for it (example, Phenom II X4-940).
I’ve done enough digging through benchmarks that I would just go with the Intel i5-750 and not go to an AMD, but it’s really up to you. I used to be a big AMD fanboy back in the Athlon hay-day, but the performance gap at comparable price/GHZ is too heavily in Intel’s favor right now for me to be too interested in AMD for a gaming machine.
pardon ma mistakes as i said i m a novice plz help me out.
For case, the size of your download Software Package can vary, thus influencing the entire process. You may also think about your type of connection when you try to download Software Program. Still the overall speed of your cyberspace provider bottom affect your download, but you behind remain assured that the website will provide you with quality Software Program. This quality is not potential to be affected by the download process.
Riyad, I’m going to have to call you out on the gtx 285 beating the new radeon cards.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2848/4
Compare it even to the lesser 5850, and it beats the 285 in more cases than not, runs cooler, consumes less power at idle and full load, and is cheaper.
Plus it’s hardly available, even when you made your comment.
Since your comment, the GTX 470 & 480 have arrived, and while they may SLIGHTLY outperform (a handful of fps) the ATI cards in a good portion of the tests, they are still MUCH more expensive and would probably dim the lights in your house, or catch your computer on fire.
Not an ATI fanboy, I’m actually an nVidia fanboy from the very beginning, but ATI is at the head of the game right now.
Now, using the GPU for crunching numbers, nVidia is far more developed.
Michael,
I totally agree with you — since making that post I spent some time grinding through performance numbers for the Intel and AMD parts (not the new 6-core AMDs though) as well as the video cards, and the AMD offerings are more appealing in almost every way.
When NVIDIA announced their DX 11 parts at the end of March, I actually did a writeup summarizing all the performance numbers I was seeing online (here) and like you said, it’s poop…
It’s almost a 50% tie between NVIDIA and AMD with who outperforms who, and given the big price gap, I really can’t recommend *the new DX11* NVIDIA parts to anyone building right now.
That being said, I’ve only ever run Intel/NVIDIA (except for an X2 Athlon for a year that was great) so I’m sort of in the same boat as you…
Thanks for posting the correction to the post.